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12/22/04

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some music news, and some new musings. OH! i'm so fucking clever.

so the album is done: "hip to be obscure" will be hitting stores (well, a couple at least) within the next month or so on headhat records. it took a few years, but i finally managed to make something musical that i don't hate. though now that i've done all these musical things, i want to make my next album really weird and hard to listen to.

that's it for the actual news, now i'm gonna subject you to 2 things i've meant to write about for a while. one thing that's kind of goofy but fun to try, one thing that's just me and my philosophical wanking.

1. here's something for you to try that is both fun and educational. as anyone who follows this website knows, i work retail, so i get a lot of exposure to... humans. and all that exposure can lead to some wonderful fun if you don't treat people like people. oh well, enough of my neuroses, here's the experiment i set out to perform one day of being chained to a register for 8 hours: don't talk to people with real words. my hypothesis was that in a retail setting with so many pre-programmed responses, people would respond to pretty much any mouth-noise with a set sentence or phrase from their mental list. i did this pretty much the whole day. as long as you mumble it a little bit, people won't even notice. except for old men, who say "what?" but i think they say that to everyone anyway. my whole day was full of "grakow muk zee!" "thanks, you too!" or "kaka yi poola?" "no, i'm all set." if you work retail, especially during christmas season, you should really try it.

2. so i have a few questions about Art, and also about music AS Art. when i look at art that is popular, and viewed favorably by most people, it's always representative art. portraits, landscapes, etc... things that look like things and shows things as they really are. that goes for any visual art, from sculpture to photography to painting. anything abstract is viewed as unpleasant. however, music is quite the opposite: with music, representative is bad. if you make a recording of cars or birds, people will just as fervently deny it to be music as they would deny a postmodern painting is really 'art'. the music that is looked at as beautiful is an abstraction of sound, played on special devices men built to create sounds that could not happen in nature. if you don't believe me that instruments create unnatural sounds, play your guitar at your cat some day. recordings of cars and birds will at best be dubbed "experimental" and at worse be dubbed "noise". what is this difference between people's eyes and their ears? why is it more pleasing to the eye to view something they see all the time, whereas the ear finds it much more enjoyable to hear things that are much more rhythmic and melodious than could possibly occur daily life? it seems like a strange contradiction in terms. and i'm not trying to even make an argument for or against abstract art or experimental music. i just want to know why they're so different in people's minds. i could go further and wonder why people find certain sounds bothersome or pleasing at all, but i'm sure some psychologist/composer somewhere thinks he has that figured out. what a dick.